Author: admin

Outside my window,
The mountains are all hiding.
Some say it’s the fog,

But I am not fooled.
Like me, Vancouver does not
Want to say goodbye.

The day after SIGGRAPH is both heady and confusing, because, like everyone else who attended, I’ve been mainlining exciting new ideas, trying to absorb the fantastic work of my peers all at once. I find that by the last day of the conference, it becomes hard to concentrate on the technical papers, because my mind is already racing to connect the dots between things I’ve already seen, and to incorporate all those new insights into my research for the coming year.

And now, on the day after the conference — after a much needed night’s sleep — I realize that somewhere in the back of my mind I am formulating plans, thinking of cool projects for students, setting aside budget for this piece of equipment or that research visit.

There are a million things you can do with the vast amount of new insight that comes with attending SIGGRAPH. The trick is to pick just a few of them, the ones that are really doable and will generate excitement and original thinking on the part of the students.

It will probably take another week or so before my mind makes the transition from wild and overambitious schemes to a solid plan of action. Meanwhile, I’m just enjoying the journey.

There are dog people, and there are cat people. They tend not to be the same people.

In my experience, dog people value the enthusiasm and loyalty of their canine companions. I have never witnessed a more pure or focused love than the emotion conveyed by a dog to his or her human.

Cat people, on the other hand, cherish the elusive mystery and independence of their feline friends. As my friend Athomas put it yesterday, “People don’t train their cats. Cats train their people.”

Which leads me to my theory.

Athomas’ comment came up during a meeting with a colleague in which we were discussing a potential project involving a virtual interactive cat. One key question that comes up in any such project is: How should a virtual cat behave?

A common question in human / computer interfaces is “How can I get it to do what I want?” But this is not quite true if you are trying to simulate a cat. After all, an interface agent that does everything you want requires only a theory of “Digital Obedience Gestalt” (DOG).

But in this case, we need to develop more of a Contrarian Attraction Theory (CAT), to describe a creature that appeals to us largely because it is so eloquent at expressing its approval or disapproval — at being so capable of not doing what we want.

Cats do what we want them to do by not doing what we want them to do.

As I watch the technical paper presentations and play with the demos of emerging technologies at SIGGRAPH, it becomes more clear to me what many of us have in common here: We are, in some way, trying to work with the tools of the present to understand the future.

The tools available today are meager compared with what we will have in another twenty years. Yet we can already think about what those future techniques will be like, and we are all trying to reason through the fog of future time, creating experiments that help us see that world to come, and perhaps build a little bit of it now.

The goal is not to make the future happen immediately — that is not possible — but rather to create just enough experience of it so that we can understand it better, and perhaps help to guide it to a better place.

So the meaning of SIGGRAPH is not really found in the particular demos and technical papers that one sees here. It is found in the shared understanding in the minds of the people in attendance.

Others may look at our tools and techniques and see only pick-axes and climbing equipment. But what we see is a majestic mountain, off in the distance. We are just trying to figure out the best way to get there.

Today I went to my favorite SIGGRAPH event — “Real-time live”. This is the event in which everything has to happen right now, interactively. It generally shows off the cutting edge of what can be done with a PC and a dream.

I was very happy that the grand prize was won by Birdly — which many of you have undoubtedly seen on the Web. This is that little piece by some young Swiss guys in which you strap on an Oculus Rift and lie down in a crazy robotic contraption that gives you the feeling of flying through the air like a bird, as you flap your arms while an actual fan blows air at you.

I was happy this won because of the fact that its coolness was very much connected to the fact that it was tethered to the real world. This isn’t an experience where you just put on a VR helmet and sit on a couch — you actually have to put your whole body into it.

There is something so delightful and charming about the fact that such a decidedly Victorian contraption — something that would have made perfect sense to H.G. Wells — wins the a grand prize at a Virtual Reality event in 2014.

It gives me hope for humanity.

This evening I watched the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater. This is the part of the conference where they show the thirty top computer graphic short films, as judged by an esteemed jury.

It is a bit of a devil’s bargain, because intermixed with the brilliant shorts and student films are excerpts from the demo reels of the major special effects houses, showing how they did this scene from “Edge of Tomorrow” or that scene from “The Desolation of Smaug”. For the most part, these are all pretty identical and devoid of even the semblance of dramatic interest.

In fact, it’s hard to see who these are for. If you are into the technology, then you already know all this stuff, so it’s boring. If you aren’t, then an endless sequence of matte shots, wireframe models and lighting layers is boring and meaningless. I suppose it’s just one of those hallowed traditions humans sometimes get caught up in, like slavery or factory farming.

But the rest was totally delightful. I found myself thinking about how much of the power of the wonderful student films and indie animations came from the choice of shot — the exact placement and movement of the virtual lens, the artful edit on action.

And I realized that a lot of what I was seeing would not translate, in anything like its current form, to a Virtual Reality experience. Cinema relies, on a very fundamental level, on directorial control over what you can see when.

Which means that the art and craft of telling stories in VR, as that genre evolves and matures, will necessarily be something quite different. It will be fun to see what that turns out to be.

The SIGGRAPH conference kicked off today with the traditional “Fast Forward”. This is the event in which all of the technical papers — and this year there will be something like 173 such papers — are previewed by their authors, who get 30 seconds each to convey the gestalt of their work.

I was one of those authors this year, and it’s always fun to get up in front of this community at the kickoff of such a great conference.

In fact, I have an unusual place in the history of the SIGGRAPH Fast Forward. The first year it was held — in 2002 in San Antonio — I had a paper at the conference. When I was told about this radical new idea, that we would each give an incredibly brief preview of our papers, I thought that was completely ridiculous.

“How can you summarize a paper in such a short amount of time?” I thought to myself. So as a kind of punk response, I wrote and then performed a gangsta rap version of my paper.

Well, dear reader, my little rebellion ended up being embraced by the community. The following year there were a number of similarly edgy takes on the Fast Forward presentation. In the intervening years, the punked-out Fast Forward presentation has evolved into a proud transition.

This year for example, one young scientist performed a truly excellent gangsta rap version of his paper. I wonder if he has any idea that I am his original mack daddy.

Our symposium today, the culmination of our three days of collective brainstorming and preparation, was a success! A large group of very interesting people came out to see what we had to show and say.

The audience asked great questions, the student demos went spectacularly well, and everybody was energized by the realization that all of our respective work really did hang together into a kind of shared vision.

Perhaps the best part was the realization that these people — the ones in the room with us — are our natural community, our future collaborators, our “fellow travelers”.

Now we’ll just have to see whether we can sustain that momentum!

For our intensive little workshop, Wednesday was brainstorming, yesterday consisted of mutual demos (followed by several hours of trying to digest and understand each others’ demos), and today was all about synthesis.

Tomorrow we will present, in a symposium, the results of our three day effort. Until this morning it wasn’t at all clear what we would end up with. There was so much to work through, so many intersecting concepts to absorb.

But over the course of the day today it all began to take shape. Knowing that we will need to go in front of a largish group of people tomorrow and present our collective ideas was a very effective motivator.

As Samuel Johnson once said of his soon-to-be-executed acquaintance William Dodd: “Depend upon it Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

Today, at a very hip coffee shop in Vancouver, our barista was a young man with a porkpie hat and a beard longer than the beard on the lead singer of ZZ Top. He also had a very cool t-shirt — black, with a printed white message that just said “[image]”.

It was the epitome of hipness. The shirt was sort of saying “Sure, there could be an image here, but that wouldn’t be cool enough. So instead I am a shirt that simply refers to the idea of an image.

I really liked that. So when I went up to the counter to return my coffee cup, I said “I like your shirt”.

Whereupon he looked at my shirt, and said “I like your shirt too, but I’m not smart enough to understand it.”

That’s when I realized that I was wearing the cultural equivalent, in my world, of the same t-shirt. Mine was also black, and printed on it in white was the Rendering equation.

This is a wonderful mathematical integral, formulated in 1986 by Jim Kajiya, that describes the fundamental laws of how things are illuminated in computer graphics. I cannot begin to count how many technical papers in the field have been built upon this formula.

So I wasn’t actually wearing a computer graphic image — I was wearing the idea of a computer graphic image. Which means, I guess, that I am, in my way, just as much of a hipster as that barista. Only without the beard and porkpie hat.

I was happy for the compliment. “Thanks!” I said, nodding toward the word on his shirt. “One of these is a way to make one of those.”